"Several of the concerns about Oracle's acquisition of Sun have revolved around how Unix technologies led by Sun would continue under the new ownership. As it turns out, Solaris users might not have much to worry about, as Oracle executives on Wednesday affirmed their commitment to preserving the efforts. In the case of Solaris, Oracle had already been a big supporter of the rival Linux operating system. Oracle has its own Enterprise Linux offering, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the idea that Linux and Solaris are mutually exclusive is a false choice."

Actually Linux scale far better than both Solaris and/or AIX. The largest single image computers are either old Irix boxes, or new numa intel boxes running linux. In fact most of the numa scheduling and cell migration from Irix was ported to Linux long long time ago.

The thing that both AIX and Solaris have going for them is that they both have their own proprietary integrated platforms (SPARC and POWER systems) which provide most of the "magic" regarding fault tolerance, and other enterprise-like facilities.

But from a processing scalability perspective, sorry neither AIX nor Solaris can hold a candle against Linux. However, as I said in other enterprise centric features both platforms are far more mature than linux, but it is mostly due to the specialized HW they run on...rather than just the software itself.

BTW, some of the largest enterprise systems, like Amazon... run almost exclusively on linux: from web fronts, load balancers, to even the DB backends. With some sprinkles of solaris/ORACLE at the very very deep backend. Granted, computers are just tools. And for plenty of applications, Solaris and AIX are far better suited than Linux. But in the same sense Linux may not have some of the specific capabilities of those systems. Labeling linux as immature or not ready for the enterprise is just silly.

Sorry, but these top supercomputers are often multi-image clusters and even if they aren't, they still run very similar workloads. If a single-image OS runs application, which is simple enough to be run on cluster, it doesn't prove scalability for me. They also have to be specially modified for their task - that alone puts it in a different league than AIX and Solaris, which run unmodified from one cpu to hundreds of cores. Larry Ellison recently explained for example, that he sees Solaris' place on the biggest machines. If it was true, what you wrote, he would choose OEL for that.

The biggest AIX server you can buy is 128 cores, the biggest Solaris serer is 256 cores, the biggest Linux server is 1024 cores. These are single image machines, not clusters. Just throwing that out there.

Larry Ellison recently explained for example, that he sees Solaris' place on the biggest machines. If it was true, what you wrote, he would choose OEL for that.

Ellison has a very good reason to promote Solaris on big machines ahead of Linux no matter what the actual facts might be. He makes more money that way. He would have to be monumentally stupid to come out and say that a cluster of Linux machines is better than Solaris on big iron after having spent a ton of money on buying Sun, even if it was true.

I don't work with big iron machines so I won't comment on what actually works better on which workloads in the real world, but I certainly wouldn't use a comment by Ellison as actual proof of anything.